DESCRIPTION: The proposed project seeks to fill in two areas in our understanding of individual's assessment of the consequences of different contraceptive choices and the importance individuals attach to each consequence. The project will go beyond much existing research that has focused on use or nonuse of contraception, or has focused on a single method. Gender will play a central role in the project. The use of most methods of contraception has different implications for men and women, with different impacts on health, convenience, sexual pleasure, and other dimensions. The proposed research effort addresses such gaps in our understanding of how people select contraceptive methods by examining how gender and other personal attributes mold an individual's assessments regarding the characteristics of alternative contraceptive methods. The project will determine how these same factors affect the importance to the individual of the various characteristics on which method alternatives are evaluated. The project will also explore how assessments about method characteristics and their importance mediate the influence of individual and couple attributes on method choice. The proposed project will use data from two recent companion surveys, the National Survey of Men and the National Survey of Women. These surveys offer comparable data on the attributes and assessments of men and women as well as on their method choices within recent sexual relationships. Further, they share overlapping samples, which means that more than 200 married and cohabiting couples are available.